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Uncovering and making real more and more of the real meaning of being fully in touch with the Now – that’s the ultimate goal. It’s the ultimate goal of many forms of spirituality and personal growth and psychotherapy.

One of the many aspects of this is learning how to be affected less and less by the ups-and-downs of life. This is something Eckhart Tolle so frequently emphasizes or implies. As you do this, it means your likes and dislikes then have ever less and less power over you, no less. Making the practice of “feeling the aliveness” part of who you are is absolutely key to all of this.

It’s not that you eventually feel less discomfort. Not at all. What happens is, you keep encountering new sources of discomfort, but their power to bring you down gets ever weaker. Unfortunately, in our society virtually everybody is an escapist. That means they “automatically” use emotional pain-killers to dull their consciousness of discomfort. But that doesn’t make the discomfort go away, except in the short term. In fact, it makes it worse – until the next dose of a pain-killer. This failure to centeredly face the pain or discomfort that’s actually there each moment in our lives – that’s the source of all our problems, our un-freedom.

 At the risk of repeating myself, happiness just isn’t something we can ever find by pursuing it. I wonder if people got misled about this by Aristotle. The things Aristotle wrote were usually spot-on accurate. But regarding happiness, he said:

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole point and aim of human existence.”

Trouble is, I don’t think Aristotle made it clear that happiness comes from basing our lives on, and valuing, “just being” at least as much as “doing”.

That still leaves the question of how “doing” contributes in some way to happiness, once we’ve already got a little. I don’t always find Eckhart Tolle helpful on that one. Instead, try this for size, from Jim Morrison, former lead singer of The Doors:

“Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.” 

 The secret of happiness, according to Tolle and many spiritual teachings, is simply to be free of wanting. That doesn’t mean no longer having desires or intentions. It does mean not relying on their fulfilment to make you happy.

The truly happy person is a little bit like somebody who finds every meal, even a meal made of leftovers, delicious. Such a person will find a haute cuisine restaurant meal even more delicious. In a similar way, the truly happy person still has strong intentions and wants – and these are all the more stronger than “average”.  

The power of now is really just the power of happiness, and of fulfillment. We need to cultivate it because it’s the only basis for true fulfillment. Our relationships and pleasures and our careers and dreams and projects can and should make our happiness greater. But that’s only possible when we already have some degree of happiness to start with. And we can create some of that now, simply by feeling the aliveness inside us. 

 Basically, what Tolle teaches is what some people call “mindfulness.” Christians call it – or I believe they should call it – “watching always”. As far as people from a Christian or Western background are concerned, it’s summed up in those parables about staying awake. But how do you ever do that “always,” as Jesus so firmly insists you must? What if you’re living the kind of life where you have work and a family and maybe also a business to deal with? I mean, Tolle even says that whenever you’re engaged in “practical matters” it’s probably better not to worry about timelessness, etc at all. I don’t agree with him there. 

But obviously, anybody living a normal type of life is too busy to spare more than a few minutes per hour at best, during much of their day. So it really comes down to doing things in those spare minutes or seconds that will “switch on” your “awakeness” enough to keep it “running” for a whole hour or more. Let’s take a look at some of the sorts of ways there are of “switching your consciousness on”. Tolle lists a number, particularly in his book Practicing the Power of Now. He calls these “portals into the Now.” I’m not going to list them all here. But let’s look at two of them. I prefer to call the first one “coming to your senses.” I mean the five senses. The whole reason why it works is that our physical senses give us believe that you’re just seeing or touching, say, a flower. But actually, because they’re subconscious, you don’t separate those associations and interpretations from the sensation. You can’t separate them – unless you’ve totally healed and removed your pain-body. (Which nobody has actually done.) And those associations are the whole problem. Don’t be deceived by Tolle, or any of the meditation traditions, into believing you are fully present in timelessness just because you’re smelling a flower.

This brings us closer towards the second “portal into the Now” that I’d like to discuss. In addition to our physical senses, we have the ability to have sensings. Usually, indigenous people and animals are very good at using sensings. For them, sensing is the primary way of knowing. Unfortunately, most people today are the equivalent of close to deaf and blind and dumb when it comes to sensing. The only way out of this difficulty is to cultivate sensing and make it grow stronger and stronger in you. To do this, you need to have a considerable amount of silence in your life, for years. That means doing things like not watching TV except perhaps occasionally, reading newspapers no more than once a week, not filling up all your time with activities or conversations or reading, and so on. Actually, sensing isn’t something that Tolle ever writes about, as far as I know. However, he does write and talk about “feeling (or sensing!) the aliveness inside you”. That’s really the most basic kind of sensing.

In my ebook at www.explainingtolle.com I describe various further “portals” or techniques or practices that you won’t find in Tolle. But there isn’t space to describe them here.  Also, once you can enter the Now easily and very often, it all becomes a matter of applying the insights you get there into your everyday life. 

In the current movie Yes Man we see the hero saying “Yes” to everything. Pretty soon we see him agreeing to ridiculous and exploitative requests. In this way, the movie eventually makes the point that “accepting everything” doesn’t mean allowing yourself to be taken advantage of.

In spiritual traditions and Tolle, we are encouraged to accept everything at least in the following sense. We need to reflect on how some of our biggest problems may be being caused by our failure to accept what is, i.e. to look at and accept the facts. Have half of your savings been wiped out recently? OK, the first step is to accept that that’s real. Then there’s a much better chance that whatever actions you choose to do will be genuinely effective.

“Accepting what is” really means “looking at what is the case” – really looking, and doing so initially without being judgmental. Quite often we can’t know or see what’s really there. In such cases, at least we know that we don’t know. That too affects what choices and actions we make. 

The trouble with telling us just to be aware / good / positive / happy is that it ignores the fact that often we need to first learn to become aware / good / positive / happy.

Tolle and the traditional meditation schools provide us with many wonderful things. But unfortunately, in this particular area they don’t tell us enough about what’s involved. 

Consider the story of the Prodigal Son. What was the true reason why there was more rejoicing over his return home than over his ninety-nine brothers?  Surely, because he had actually learnt to understand and then become genuinely good. While his self-righteous brothers did neither of those.

J. Krishnamurti, whom Tolle has claimed as a major influence, insisted one should “question everything”. Of course, this would definitely be asking too much, for most people. Krishnamurti’s idea was that after you have “subtracted” everything your questioning reveals to be false, what remains must be “the truth”. Sounds like Sherlock Holmes, doesn’t it? It assumes your questioning is accurate, and quite nonjudgmental at the beginning.  

But in my experience, one of the biggest problems for people involved in personal growth or spirituality is that they often don’t apply any such questioning at all to the utterances of their teacher.

Let’s suppose a person like this also agrees with the “walking your talk” principle. Then what such people’s actions reveal they actually believe often seems quite different from what they claim to. Let’s suppose they don’t have a full understanding of, say, all of Tolle’s words. Then although they may say they “believe in” Tolle’s words, their actions will reveal they are sometimes quite hypocritical. That’s a problem my ebook, What’s Missing In Eckart Tolle, is designed to help any Tolle reader to overcome in great detail.  

I always prefer to concentrate mostly just on the practical implications of what a spiritual teacher is saying.

At the end of the day that’s the essence, as far as I am concerned. With that very much in mind, I’m now offering a free 28-page ebook, titled The Keys To What Tolle Teaches, to anyone who purchases my 96-page ebook, What’s Missing In Eckhart Tolle. Also free is an 8-page ebook titled Meditation: How It Really Works. Another free bonus is a 10-minute audio guiding you through a meditation session. For more details, click here:

Explaining Tolle Website 

 “Are you putting up with whatever is depressing your joy of life because you’re  afraid or scared of change? If the answer is yes, you are not being true. You are not being true to yourself.”  –  Barry Long

In Eckhart Tolle’s first major book, The Power Of Now, he writes that we reach the Now primarily through “observing” ourselves. (Self-) observation is certainly one of the most central themes in Tolle’s writings. At one of his retreats, Tolle has clarified that observation is only possible if we are being totally nonjudgmental. What does being totally nonjudgmental about ourselves imply? Well, for a start, among many things, I find it means deeply liking ourselves – which most people certainly don’t. It also means totally forgiving ourselves. That forgiveness doesn’t mean that we stop working on improvements to the mistakes we make. Because we’re forgiving ourselves for any mistakes, that doesn’t mean we don’t do our best to fix the mistakes, or to fix what made us do them. On the contrary! Because we forgive ourselves, only then can we see very clearly and understand what we really did and what its effects were. – Or I should say “are,” because we’re looking at the ongoing effects that are here now.  

I consider it’s unfortunate that he often uses the term “dis-identification” for such detachment in relation to personal change and growth. It’s not unfortunate in one sense. His critical analysis of society, in particularly the first half of A New Earth, is builton his descriptions of the negative consequences of “identifying with” any roles and so on. The reason I consider it’s unfortunate is that in the process of major personal change, the first stage can perhaps most accurately be described as one of identification of precisely what one’s inner obstacle is. Such identification is by no means always easy. It can take even very aware people months or years, in some instances. It can then sound a little confusing to tell somebody the next stage is “dis-identification.” Then again, Tolle often also says one needs to create “space” at that stage, which is great. The other difficulty is that he doesn’t describe the other stages of the process other than the second one in enough detail. Not in as much detail as is necessary, in all my experience.